Sponsored by
THE FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY
of The Jewish Theological Seminary
3080 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-4649

On September 3, 1897, after the First Zionist Congress
held in Basle, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary, “In Basle I have founded
the Jewish State…Perhaps in five years, possibly in fifty, everyone will
realize it.” These words have by now become famous, because they are as
true as they are grandiose. When the State of Israel came into being on May 14,
1948, many of the political and administrative institutions of the new republic
were already in place, having evolved under the auspices of the Zionist Congresses.
Some of these institutions, in fact, continue to dominate the contemporary Israeli
political scene.

Between 1901 and 1946 the Zionist Congresses met bi-annually in various European
cities with interruptions for the two World Wars. These Congresses created an
institutional framework whose aim it was to further the cause of Jewish settlement
in Palestine. The Zionist Organization, created at the First Congress, served
as an umbrella organization for the Zionist movement. Its financial operations
were conducted by the Jewish Colonial Trust (founded 1899), and land acquisition
was delegated to the Jewish National Fund (founded 1901). Membership in the Zionist
Organization was open to all Jews, and the right to vote for the Congresses was
secured by the purchase of the Zionist Shekel.

The peculiarity of the Zionist movement, which was similar in ideology and aims
to other forms of European nationalism, consisted of the fact that at its very
inception, owing to the realities of Jewish dispersion in Europe and America,
it had to be organized on a supra-national basis. An additional factor influencing
the emergence of the Zionist institutional framework was the need to unite under
the banner of Zionism an extremely varied array of ideological groupings, which
included Marxist Socialists, largely bourgeois Revisionists, who seceded from
the Zionist Organization after the Eighteenth Congress (Prague, 1933), and the
Orthodox Mizrachi faction. Because of these factors, the parties represented
at the Zionist Congresses tended to be organized along ideological, rather than
territorial lines. At the Twenty-First Congress (Geneva, 1939), there were 386
delegates from such ideological parties, versus 171 delegates representing territorial
groupings. This lack of territorially based representation persists in the Israeli
electoral system. Another inherited feature is voting for party lists, rather
than for individual candidates.

cont'd..

Three major parties emerged in the yishuv (Zionist community in Palestine)
during the Mandatory period: Ben Gurion’s Labor party Mapai (an acronym
for Mifleget Poalei Yisrael), Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, and the
General Zionists who were loyalists of Chaim Weizmann. When the Zionist Organization
was named by the League of Nations as the “Jewish agency” whose task
it was to cooperate with the British Mandatory power in the development of the
yishuv, the respective strengths of the parties in terms of membership
acquired a new and vital significance – certificates for entry into Palestine
were granted by the Mandatory authorities in accordance with the “party
key” system, i.e., in accordance with the proportion of the electorate controlled
by each of the parties.

The election campaigns were organized in ways familiar to the citizens of democratic
states – slogans displayed on posters, propaganda meetings led by party
representatives, booklets detailing party platforms, and the dissemination of
voting information by non-partisan election committees. The voting procedure,
still in use in Israel, consisted of selecting one of a series of printed sheets
containing the various party lists and placing this sheet into the ballot box.
This exhibition highlights some of the printed ephemera generated by the election
campaigns for the Zionist Congresses as they were conducted in the yishuv.